"One of Microsoft's hottest new profit centers is a smartphone platform you've definitely heard of: Android. Google's Linux-based mobile operating system is a favorite target for Microsoft's patent attorneys, who are suing numerous Android vendors and just today announced that another manufacturer has agreed to write checks to Microsoft every time it ships an Android device. Microsoft's latest target is Wistron Corp., which has signed a patent agreement 'that provides broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for Wistron's tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome platform', Microsoft announced." That's the reality we live in, folks. This is at least as criminal - if not more so - than Microsoft's monopoly abuse late last century. After the Nortel crap, it's completely left the black helicopter camp for me: Microsoft, Apple, and several others are working together to fight Android the only way they know how: with underhand mafia tactics. Absolutely sickening. Hey Anonymous, are you listening? YES I WENT THERE.

if you are complaining about Microsoft Copying a software idea from sun, then maybe they should have had some protections from Microsoft copying their idea ... something like a patent ...

I never complained that Microsoft copied the idea (which is a bunch of copies itself, too).

And Sun didn't complain about it either, but they complained and sued and won about violating contracts based on licensing the Java trademark - a purely defensive mechanism (in this case) to make sure that no-one else (and Microsoft and/or IBM in particular) can dilute Sun's product name.

Java was big for being a comprehensive package with commercial support, lots of marketing, and a low barrier to entry (cheap SDK, cheap licensing, "similarity" to popular languages)
If anything, they could have applied for a business method patent on that. Unfortunately, that "market" was just about to be opened up (ie. such a patent would have been refused in 1994, but not in 2001).

There were incremential improvements on what kind of optimizations the JIT compiler could do, given the new found CPU power, etc. Obvious stuff.

Unfortunately the patent offices of the world don't seem to read papers of the 1960s and 1970s unless they were patents themselves. Otherwise much of the current software patent junk wouldn't go through.

And that stuff wasn't regularily patented back then because code was considered math. And math was considered off-limits for the patent office.

(sidenote:)
A government entity decided to enlarge its scope (at least twice: on code/math and on business methods). Why are Republicans defending this governmental interference? ;-)